Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Creative writing and fiction

The thicket

people have forged a pathway through the undergrowth, trampled the soggy earth, folded in leaves and twigs and absences, wet foliage overhead, burdened by clouds the color of sadness. my daily walk. I sidestep, eschew, go around greedy damp vegetating hands incessantly grabbing the narrowing light. I slither like a shadow among thorns. a stretch…
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People call it October (IV)

it’s fall. inexorable falling. the sun, now, nothing much but a hazy blotch of heat looking up from the water: sprawled, splayed, just light pouring, floating atop the river, blended with the chill. eddies of light quiet and deep crude glitter amid the discovery that foliage, quivering foliage can’t last; and time itself, being stripped,…
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People call it October (III)

the air is crisp and cool the leaves are crisp and dying your walk on the levee, now, a brisk jog home. the horizon, burgundy, ashen, like a once raging fire put out by the night. from the river banks, a spectral mist, rising – reeking of sweet rot, all-engulfing – makes everything forgotten: the…
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People call it October (II)

it’s always best when you don’t know where you’re going. let the path take you where you need to be. if your feet hurt, sit on the bristling grass, straddle the shoulder of that hill, whisper a loving prayer, or maybe even weep a little. put one foot forward – doesn’t matter which, but don’t…
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People call it October (I)

I walk. I think nothing of it. I walk. I hear nothing but the raspy sound my boots make on pebbles the wheezing past of dragonflies in their autumnal attire the leaves – still green, crackling dry, floating in silence without aim. people jogging, imagining they’re going places. dust. hearts beating, heaving, panting, the trunks…
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Quote of the day

“To pit oneself against the mountain is necessary for every climber; to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience. (…) What he values is a task that, demanding of him all he has and is, absorbs…
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Quote of the day

“More and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.…
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I don’t

I don’t have the right face for my feelings. I’m not beautiful. My features aren’t exquisite – soft, elegant, dainty – no, they are quite banal. I have a mean frown and people suspect coarseness inside indeed my core is hard and rough and uneven – like scars, dry and drying, like crackling scales. I…
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Pentecost in the Buila-Vanturarita National Park

Dear friends and followers, for those of you who understand Romanian, Liternet.ro has published my recent adventures in the Buila-Vanturarita National Park. My travelogue has been split into two episodes, which you can read here: https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/41988/Andreea-Sepi/Rusalii-in-Parcul-National-Buila-Vanturarita-I.html and here: https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/42132/Andreea-Sepi/Rusalii-in-Parcul-National-Buila-Vanturarita-II.html
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On the outside, looking in

This, this, I tell myself, this see-through envelope of blueness that contains us, this fluid in which we move, this shallow film of sunlight collecting into magnanimous pools, rippling, cascading, eroding, building its deep dark wells of forgetfulness, turning our chunky limbs of flesh into ethereal shadows that precede us slanting, hovering, levitating, always one…
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Finding one’s way home

To my Romanian followers: My good friend and travel guide co-author, Claudia Tănăsescu, returned to Timisoara, Romania from Brussels some 10 years ago. She has documented her journey back and her search for a reconstructed notion of home in a heartfelt, poetic, and often funny multimodal text that is both autobiographical novel and photo project.…
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Easter itineraries – or in search of inspiration

Nowhere else is the sweet stillness of spring and the cheerful chirruping of songbirds as soothing as in the Romanian countryside in those last quiet hours before Easter, at the foot of a mountain dotted with caves and age-old monasteries. We spent three days around the northern parts of Gorj and Valcea counties in southern…
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